Dune

Rare: a uniquely happy marriage of narrative and mechanics. I can't imagine what it would be like to play not knowing the Dune universe. Overly complex. Over a dozen plays in and we still get the rules wrong. Six players all but mandatory. But the design keeps giving (and giving in, to story). Here imbalance is virtue. Six factions that resist and enable each other in delightful ways. The Bene Gesserit may never win, but never-winning has never been so fun. Defeat here has the glow of defeat in narrative: somehow it's more interesting, more vital. Games need drama. The story of numbers adds up to nothing. Full disclosure: I hated math until I discovered it had imaginary numbers.

Quite possibly the best board game ever published.

Dune represents perhaps the best adaptation ever done of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic. It is a brilliant work of game design, rife with negotiation, uncertainty, and huge dramatic moments. This is my kind of stuff.

This is a mad game. I'm not aware of any other title that screws without your head quite so much in terms of feeding drips of information to individual players and making everyone excruciatingly paranoid. Every decision you make is a horrible combination of mechanical strategy (no dice, remember) and hidden information: the tension is palpable. Indeed if anything the game is almost too tense. The legendary manner in which the game connects to the source material hardly needs further discussion and is well deserved. However the near-requirement for 5-6 players for a satisfying session is a shame.